The guitarist Geddy Lee considered “totally underrated”
Most artists will have to do something beyond impressive to catch the eye of Geddy Lee. Considering the man is a musical freak of nature known for playing multiple instruments at once during a Rush gig, no one’s necessarily going to become his next favourite band with an acoustic guitar strumming a song. While Lee was still an impressionable teenager, his first time seeing Jethro Tull gave him his new favourite guitar player no one had heard of.
Before Lee had even learned what progressive music was, he was already firmly entrenched in the sounds of rock and roll. Picking up the guitar after being given the money by his mother, Lee started to parse out any lick that he could wrap his fingers around, initially loving the guitar lick of Roy Orbison’s ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’.
After the likes of Led Zeppelin started making waves, Lee became a rock and roll freak, eventually starting a band with school buddy Alex Lifeson. While Lee was starting to grow as a musician, the entire music scene was growing with him, with acts like Yes and Pink Floyd starting to gain traction because of their impeccable musicianship.
Even for the progressive rock outfits out at the time, Jethro Tull was always a bit of a strange anomaly. Compared to the bluesy groups that had come out around the same time, the band had quickly started to learn their chops with classical music as well. For every great artist that claimed to pull off an incredibly fast solo, not too many of them were quoting Bach, as Tull did on their interpretation of ‘Bouree’.
There was always a lighthearted side to the band, though, eventually taking the piss out of progressive grandeur on Thick as a Brick. Telling a story across two sides of vinyl, most of the track feels like a parody of what progressive rock was supposed to be, all while making the most impressive stylistic changes anyone had ever heard.
Although the group were clearly making a lighthearted jab at their contemporaries, Lee was mesmerised by what he heard coming from Martin Barre. Despite having the bluesy chops that would have impressed Jimmy Page, Barre was able to channel every piece of their music into rock and roll, like turning the folksy progression of ‘Aqualung’ into a showstopper.
Seeing them on the Thick as a Brick tour, Lee thought Barre flew under the radar for most fans, telling Guitar World, “Their music is so brilliantly written and well put together, what with its hard-to-play parts and odd time signatures. Not to mention the great guitar sounds of the totally underrated Martin Barre. I love how, no matter what influences they brought into the music, from classical to folk, they always did it in a rock context.”
That sense of adventure most likely rubbed off when Rush was starting to make their own creative reinventions. Outside of their own stretched-out exercises, Lee helped the group through their most inventive period in the 1980s, latching onto the sounds of keyboards while still making them work in the context of the band. Rush already had the potential to become a great outfit in the beginning, but the inventiveness of Barre and the rest of Jethro Tull may have given them permission to try their hand at their own strange experiments.
